1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a computer peripheral device, and more particular to a method for duplicating data from a source data medium to a plurality of target media in a fast and reliable way.
2. Description of the Related Art
A simple and fast way of duplication is cloning the source medium to another medium. For a read-only media, there will not be the issue of writing datum, so that such media have the data gathering up to have all data effective for duplication.
There are random-access medium, which may read and write data, having empty regions for the data written therein latterly, so that a file may be divided into several fragments and stored in different regions of the medium. The random-access medium usually has a manage space and a data space, wherein the manage space stores the information of operating system and file system, such as partition table, active program, file allocation table (FAT) etc., and the data space stores the data of the files therein. FAT is a table recording the contents of the data in the data space, including names of the files, addresses of the data, such as cluster addresses, for the index of the files.
To duplicate a source random-access medium to another target random-access medium, the data of the manage space of the source random-access medium are copied first, and then system will read the content of FAT to copy the files in the data space in a way of file by file. As a result, the read/write heads of the source and target media reciprocate between the FAT in the manage space and the fragments of files in the data space repeatedly that slows the speed of duplication much when the files have a large number of fragments and the fragments are not centralized.